A pack of naked hot dog people, attacking a lone male camper in the woods? Shiny long sausages, tackling him to the ground? You don’t have to be Freudian to see that this obviously is a phallic nightmare. In fact, the obviousness of that latent subtext is so much in the foreground, that it may even occlude the overt message here: the ad’s “narrative” is suggesting that you should not attempt to eat a whole “pack” of “dogs” when you go camping, else they will get their revenge on you. But if you do…Tums can shield and protect you from the heartburn pain.

The return of the repressed is a kind of acid reflux — you ate something you should not have, and it has come back to haunt you. What makes all this uncanny is that the symbolism of the “dog” is literalized, in the way the commercial depicts this food as animal. The dogs “bark at the moon” in the stunning opening shot, where a crouching nude body stands in contrast to an unusually large full moon, with all the sexual repression latent in the way it’s showing his “buns.” This is the stuff of not only Sigmund Freud, but also werewolf literature, and not acid reflux remedies…but in the magic system of advertising, all commercial products — from foods (Pillsbury Doughboy) to batteries (Energizer Bunny) — can be living creatures, like something possessed with the power they want you to believe the product has… akin to something supernatural. This is what is meant by commodity fetishism: attributing supernatural agency to consumer goods, and reifying the systems of production that can magically solve all your everyday problems.

But unlike the usual supernaturalization of product spokesmen (like we get with many other medications, like the “gut man” for Xifaxan — here’s a good commercial example), Tums doesn’t give us some magical walking “tummy”. Instead the disturbing creatures are foods that are aggressive and hostile and must be vanquished. The Hot Dog commercial cited above is but one of a series of “Food Fight” advertisements from Tums antacid that treat foods as large (clearly costumed) ambulatory creatures. Other ads show headless dead chickens, belligerent tacos, bullish T-Bones, and feisty little Italian meatballs. In every case, consumers must defend themselves from food that attacks them, and the tablets of Tums are framed as a kind of magical shield. The man in the Hot Dog commercial literally holds a “torch” in one hand and the tiny Tums Smoothies package in the other before him, the way Van Helsing holds up a torch and a cross to keep a vampire at bay!

Product as magical shield.

The ad condenses its narrative so swiftly that there are some disjunctive cuts — in one shot, “when heartburn comes creeping up on you,” the camper is tackled and overtaken by the pack of dogs, who seem to scrabble over his groin; then a cut shows him on his feet, holding the Tums jar aloft to chase them away. As we try to put together what just happened in the gap across the cut, which has all the suggestion of a kind of rape, if not murder — the advertisement switches into “scientific demonstration” mode to offer an explanation: through animation, it shows a dissolving tablet morphing into ghost-like magic tendrils that encircle the pain and sphinctering in on flames to extinguish them; the voiceover claims this is how the antacid “neutralizes stomach acid at its source.” Afterward, the medicated man blows out his hot dog stick-slash-torch, symbolically blowing out the “burn” of said stomach acid with a satisfied smile. Then the infamous “tum-ta-tum-tum” chorus closes out the ad. Importantly, this jingle is reminiscent of the Dragnet theme, associating the product in our cultural memory with a power akin to the “protectors” from law enforcement or the shield of the police, and, playing out over the image of the Tums logo and Smoothies product, it gets the final say.

The micro-ghosts of medicine at work.

While these Tums commercials are all about force, battle and aggression, they are uniformly framed as “defensive” actions, projecting the conservative impulse to “protect” ourselves from a threat. Often in ads, these threats are associated with abstractly gendered, sexual tensions — from the meatballs and steaks that interrupt men on a date, challenging their masculinity, to the virtual gang rape of a man by ambulatory phalluses while alone in the woods. (It is interesting to contrast this against the Tums Taco advert, where the less phallic, more yonic, Taco tackles women — until one picks up a guitar and beats the Mexican entree, ending in a liberated, libidinal Mariachi dance).

These commercials are depicting “monster battles” and the more one thinks about the way they really are treating food as limbless, eyeless, headless creatures the more nightmarish they might become. But what they are really doing is representing these edible Others as containable threats, for they are human, but “less than human.” This manages to counterbalance the weirdness of monstrous bodies against the realm of comedy, resulting in an unsettling but chuckle-worthy sense of uncanniness. (Contributing to the unsettled nature of this is our repressed awareness that what we eat is also something that once lived — other animals, who once lived and breathed just like us — organic forms whose bodies have been sacrificed and repurposed into objects for our consumption (and then in these ads, monstrously reborn all over again as part-human, part-entree hybirds). The humor is enacted by virtue of excessive and ludicrous imagery, the mode of parody in the Dragnet and Dracula references, and even the babytalk inherent to the product’s naming: Tums “Smoothies.” A “smoothie” is typically an organic fruit drink, not a chemical heartburn remedy, so this over-the-counter product still aligns itself with consumerism by virtue of naming its medicine as a kind of comfort food. And the term “tum” (or “tummy”) is clearly a childish way of saying “stomach.” This reassurance is regressive: it’ll all be okay in your tum-ta-tum-tum, after all, poor child-adult. Just pop this chewable pill….

In the end we are assured by the domestic comedy, and the restoration of these animistic beliefs from childhood, that these supernatural agents are harmless and that this is all just in good fun. Reassurances often take the structure of psychological disavowal when they circulate in advertising. This dreamwork logic disavows, occludes, and obfuscates the very real issue at the root of it all: that consumerism itself is often to blame for all this ulcerating acidity in the first place, and that heartburn medicine offers a “quick fix” mostly so that you can continue to over-indulge. These comical narratives are not just stories about putting the acid reflux in remission, but are stories about the power of the consumer product to repress guilt over unconscious desire, in order that we might indulge our fantasies and consume all over again, even when we consciously know that what we are doing might be harmful and “come back to haunt us” later. They perfectly embody the popular uncanny.

Kudos to the fast food chain Burger King (and their marketing team, led by VP Fer Merchado), for making a bold step in addressing the special needs of people with hearing disabilities. To celebrate the most recent American Sign Language Day (on April 15th, 2016), they ran an advertising campaign that directly targeted the deaf, which included overhauling an entire restaurant in Washington DC, and replacing all lettering on their materials with symbols of hand-lettering in ASL sign. It also launched a viral marketing campaign featuring the heretofore silent King, who on video signs to the audience and invites viewers to create a new hand gesture for their Whopper sandwich — the “Whoppersign” — and to post a video of it online with the search tag “#whoppersign.”

The #whoppersign campaign is a wonderful advertising gambit with a fantastic aim: to respect and serve the hearing impaired community. You have to applaud Burger King for marshaling its chinadoll-faced mascot, King, to employ American Sign Language and turn to a higher social purpose. Check out the original video and its backstory, as recently published at AdWeek.

Mental Floss explains why this is progressive advertising: “It differs from many ad campaigns of this type, in that it’s not about a company giving something to a disadvantaged community, but about asking for their input on something. Also, the commercial spends time letting signers explain for themselves what they love about their language, which makes it a perfect contribution to the celebration of National ASL Day.” In other words, there is empowerment through self-expression here, where the consumers are entrusted and given power over the creative messaging.

BK is making a step in the right direction, certainly, but if it weren’t for the warm embrace of the deaf community so far, one could just as easily see this as an exploitative publicity stunt. I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt, because it does open up a dialogue with the hearing-disabled and it does show that BK is serious in their corporate commitment to diversity and inclusion. But of course it is also very much in their vested interest to not only appeal to a target audience by “speaking their language” in an effort to develop brand loyalty, but it is also crass commercialism to presume that their hamburger deserves something more than a trademark — its own word in the lexicon of ASL. After all, there already IS a sign for hamburger.

How does this relate to the Uncanny?

In a sort of cultural maskaphobia, the masked King character has in recent history become a pop icon that has been aligned with the uncanny quite often (Adam Kostko, for instance, features King as his primary and defining icon of the book Creepiness in mass culture — this great excerpt in the journal, New Inquiry is well worth reading fully). Like many “dolls which come to life” in the literature and film of the uncanny, the commercials for King are always inherently uncanny because his unrealistic mask refuses access to the identity of the person miming behind it, causing us to suspect some “unseen force” — a strangely inhuman-yet-humanlike agency — is at work here with a mind all its own. The “Wake up with the King” TV commercial campaign has been treated as emblematic of this creepiness.

As I frequently have argued, cartoony advertising spokesmodels and mascots (think of animated figures like the Pillsbury Doughboy or Michelin Man) often attempt to embody a corporate entity — a business — as if it were a singular life all its own. This is, actually, what a “corporation” is: an embodiment of an idea. Along the way, repressed desires and secret wishes are “released” or affirmed publicly by them, rendering these dolls a sort of living-dead commodity fetish.

While the “Wake Up” ad literally is a dramatization of “breakfast in bed” served up by a corporate mascot, Kostko reads this commercial as rife with homoerotic tension, triggering a “return of the repressed” sensation, and that clearly is evident in this bedroom scene. From the dominating intimacy of the King lying “in bed” with the consumer to the comedic moment where they hold hands across the man’s knee, the sexual innuendos are everywhere in evidence, displaced onto the closeups on the sandwich as if this fetishism were the consummation of pleasure. Add to the mix a very obvious, yet easy-to-overlook element of social class issues: the topsy-turviness of having a clownish representation of royalty “serve” the common, working class man. What is uncanny about this is not merely (or only) a “return of repressed” sexual desire, but a kind of economic wish-fulfillment as well — a comedic inversion of social roles, implied by the King’s chummy servitude, where a man can be served breakfast in bed by a representative of elite economic power, who in turn is a capitalistic icon of consumer culture. Fitting, then, that it is a food object that is fetishized here as if it were not just sexual, but supernatural. The sandwich is a “double croissandwich” — described in voice over and in replay where the phrase “egg and meat and cheese” is repeated. In other words, we have an uncanny doubling.

In hindsight, looking back at this ad through the context of this week’s campaign in which the King “breaks his silence” through hand sign — it is worth paying attention to how sound actually functions in the “Wake Up with the King” advert. There is birdsong playing as ambient sound while the man in bed is shown sleeping, and we probably don’t even recognize in the background that the King’s regalia is there behind his head, subtly moving with King’s breathing. The “creepy” King is performing something voyeuristic here right from the onset. But if we are situated with the viewpoint of the sleeping man, then the advert begins in a dream state. The man in bed awakens to the shock of reality-as-dream: the fantastic King towering above him.

There is the momentary beat of shock and wonder — what is this creep doing in my bed? what are his intentions? — when the King gently raises his finger in a “hold on, let me show you my croissandwich and explain” sort of gesture. The score plays an uptempo song for the remainder of the ad, characterizing his intent as safe and fun-loving, echoed by the somewhat gravelly and strange voice-over (one we might inherently assign to the King himself by association). But what is interesting to me is that the King DID use hand signals in this early commercial: he always has relied on pantomime; he always already has been gestural.

But the new “whoppersign” campaign has its own uncanny appeal, as it brings together bodies with language through sign language. And there is a strangeness to all this that I would speculate is felt as uniquely uncanny most of all by the deaf consumer, since their special needs are usually ignored by advertising and brand marketing (beyond minimal tokens and expressions guided by the basic legalities)…yet here they suddenly, surprisingly, are spoken to visually by someone who doesn’t speak at all to the typical hearing-abled consumer. This reversal of roles could be experienced like a “secret language” come to life in the public, by the mass market.

When the King was silent, as he mostly has been up to this point, he’s chilled us with paranoid concern about what that king-thing might be thing-king. No longer do we worry what’s on his mind; we don’t attribute suspicious motives to it, since it finally is speaking to us, and it “comes to life” in a new way that is human. The hands divert our attention… they are “real” albeit disembodied (and perhaps oddly thin, long and pale), as they are detached from a “head.” Yet we “know” this is a human in a costume, someone capable of composing and signing language with a mind. When King starts to “speak” with its hands, you may at first feel a sensation of the uncanny, but the longer it “speaks” — and the more we witness it (him?) interacting with others — the safer and more domesticated King becomes. His intentions, implicitly, are pure. The King is not an evil embodiment of weirdness. The suggestion is that he has been a special needs monarch all along. (This would suggest that his Otherness is really a construct of fears by the normative masses all along, too — the masses who, it should come as no surprise, have a long history of representing and often demonizing the disabled as Other. This “ableistOthering” treats people with unfortunate disabilities as abnormal, monstrous, alien or supernatural — something lesser than a socially-normative construct of the Self.)

Is the Uncanniness of the King spokesmodel being culturally turned around to progressive ends? Perhaps, so long as the King and the corporation alike respect the marginalized “voice.”

All things considered, I think the must “uncanny” sensation that this campaign unleashes is located in the nature of the sign itself. Freud has famously written that the uncanny is launched “when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes.” This is precisely what we see when the Burger King sign, logo, and even menu is rewritten in ASL — returned to us language that is “the same” yet “unfamiliar” to the everyday consumer.

And it is doubly estranged to the deaf themselves, who do emotionally-loaded double-takes when they first encounter signs of hand expressions where there “should be” lettering, signs where there once was logo, signs substituting for signs. The uncanny triggers a gasp of pleasure or amazement — as the company breaks through the monolithic presumption of English print language in the form of ASL’s direct address.

It is important that this whoppersign be constructed by the community they are speaking “to.” ASL isn’t written by any one entity just like Webster did not invent the English language. Instead, French sign language was adapted into English and standards emerged in schools for the deaf. The whoppersign, albeit corporate branding, is asking the deaf to create a sign — a phoneme of language — that does not exist, to symbolize their brand of hamburger. That is passing the power of advertising over to the people; it is active culture empowerment, acknowledging and giving “voice” to a segment of the population that is often ignored by mass marketing and literally silenced by the culture, who chooses not to listen. At the same time, it is corporate branding of graphic language in the interest of revising a cultural story about their King icon — reframing his silence as not creepy or uncanny, but merely misunderstood and marginalized.

The Consumer is the King

Whoppersign is not yet settled. There is no “winner” yet, selected by the corporation. I think it is up to the hearing-impaired community to adopt these expressions and conventionalize them. But for now we have an advertising brand name rendered a living, moving entity — a symbol-under-revision — a structure deconstructing in the linguistic system of the popular uncanny. There are many issues with profiteering off the marginalized, too. But what what we seem to have right now is a kind of performance of consumerism, via viral video marketing, as a pantomime of empowerment.

If you’re like me, you may have driven through tollbooths on an Interstate highway and noticed that Flo — the spokeswoman in ads for Progressive Insurance, has begun appearing everywhere.

The incessant repetition of product advertising across media breeds product familiarity. But it’s a familiarity that doesn’t always register until we encounter the advertisements again in places we don’t expect them and begin to suspect there is a superstructure at play around us that we are unaware of…an uncanny feeling of what Freud termed “the omnipotence of thoughts.”

You know there’s something uncanny going on in American culture when people start donning Halloween costumes inspired by a popular figure. Progressive sells costume kits and doles out advice to Dress Like Flo, and people like to do so, if their imaginary spokesman’s (currently) 5.4 million facebook fans are any indication. Flo is everywhere, partly because we have absorbed her into our cultural personality. Flo is us and we are Flo.

There’s something about Flo that is appealing to the American masses. She never stops smiling and has all the affectation of an earnest clown, coupled with her mission to “protect” (as all insurance promises), so it’s hard not to like her. It could be her appearance that makes her almost “one of us” — the young “working mother” that she appears to be, working hard at the sell, always a true believer in her employer, because it allows her to play caregiver. Like a peppy Maytag Man or Verizon installation man (“Can you hear me now?”), she’s a model worker in some ways — an embodiment of the indefatigable zest the company wants to portray. But her apron is a sign of domesticity as much as it is of her job as insurance seller. And what’s uncanny about her it’s not just Flo’s almost inhumanly joyful personality, but her never-changing appearance. She IS the white apron uniform. She IS the haircut and name badge and lipstick-encircled teeth. It’s an infinitely reproducible look (in costume for both the actress on the commercial and for anyone at the Halloween party).

The television commercials that Progressive produce are quite well done and fully aware of Flo’s status as advertising icon. They are often self-reflexive in a way that incorporates elements of the uncanny. Take the “Superhouse” ad, for instance.

This commercial is more fantasy than message, depending almost entirely on its audience’s previously held knowledge about Flo and the whole oeuvre of Progressive insurance advertising. history. And it is in the strange familiarity of the imagery and the narrative logic of the fantastic that the characteristics of the uncanny begin to unsettle the husband on the sofa (the only character that does not change throughout), who ostensibly stands in for the spectator.

What makes this ad a vehicle of the popular uncanny?

First, the narration literally IS “progressive”: it displays the progressive transformation of a domestic space (the stereotypical family home) into the imaginary world of a Progressive insurance company — by stages, the home comes to resemble the stagey white and abstract set of the Progressive ads: Flo’s lair, if you will. It also displays an erasure of any individuality or personality that might have been resident in the home (though as I’ve said, that home is inherently a template, a stereotype, to begin with). Employing the structure of the Fantastic, the ad is literalizing the figurative , and we are asked to understand what we have just seen through the final metaphor, expressed by an unseen narrator at the very end: “The Name Your Price tool…making your world a little more Progressive.”

So what the commercial is doing is aligning “your world” with Progressive insurance, but we are only shown referents to various tropes in other Progressive commercials. Everything is “strangely familiar” but never quite stable in its reference: Flo is NOT in the ad. She is a ghost that possesses the mother figure, as she mixes her frosting. In cut after cut the uncanny magic of cinematic editing transforms her into Flo’s doppelganger. The walls in these shots become more and more like the set of the Progressive ads, until we get literal indicators (the housewife’s apron bears a logo, the boxed insurance “packages” have replaced books and other items on the shelves, and the “Check Out” sign hangs behind the housewife-turned-Flo-Clone, and in the end two minor characters from older Progressive ads suddenly appear on the couch to make a joke). Step by step, the “progressive” accumulation of signs of the company take over the domestic space…and it is this creeping sense of being taken over (as if buried alive) by the advertising that may trigger a sensation of the uncanny in the viewer.

Ostensibly, this narrative plays out in the mind of the man on the couch, fantasizing over his laptop. This is indicated by his frequent looks up toward the ceiling, the moments of silence during the ad when he seems to not respond or pay attention directly to his wife’s dialogue, etc.

But if we scrutinize the details in the advertisement, the male fantasy becomes even more disturbing. Why does the child on the couch, too, transform into a Flo? And why do the women in this ad seem to be clueless about their own transformation? To the latter point, it would seem they are objects of desire in the husband’s viewpoint — transformed from the subjects of familial love into objects of commerce and exchange, potentially of a sexual nature. How so? A Freudian might point to the housewife’s actions: “mixing the batter” is a metaphor for a sexual act, and the “name your price” line as it is delivered (“I’m looking at it right now”) is a bit of an innuendo for a sexual proposition. This subtle message is reinforced because the result is the figuration of a “baby Flo” — the child on the couch, a genetically-determined Flo, the result of sexual union between the unchanging man on the sofa and the Flo clone mixing her batter.

While a Freudian interpretation like the one above may be a bit laughable, the ad does seem to be entirely involved in “reproduction” in that it is literally engaged in reproducing the memory of earlier ads in the home, and in the viewer’s memory of Progressive advertising. One probably doesn’t normally think of the Flo icon as a sex object (i.e., she is a salesperson figure, not a supermodel selling beer), but every fictional ad is an expression of wish fulfillment. The wish expressed here is a little obscure — if it is male desire, then it mingles sexual longing with a desire for transformation of the domestic sphere into something more like…a workplace. An unconscious recognition of this occurs when the two male characters (who play “competitors” from other insurance carriers) appear on the sofa as if they too have moved in — and immediately ask about the bedroom (“the guest room situation”).

The sexual messages at work here play out at the same time as a domestic familial space is transformed into a commercialized insurance workplace. What underlies it all is not so much sex as familial ideology: a male fantasy about the ideal sexual division of labor. The husband is at leisure, fantasizing on the couch. The mother is essentially working in the kitchen throughout, “serving” her family’s needs. The child is passive and behaved in its unmoving silence. The unique elements of individual personality, familial love relations and female subjectivity undergo erasure, replaced by the generic world of the insurance company.

So of course the commercial cannot be entirely serious or realistic. It remains disturbing, uncanny, unsettling…all because it is not human at all. To me, this ad is a representation of virtually all advertising and how it progressively saturates so deeply into our everyday lives that we cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality, sign and symbol. This intellectual uncertainty, mixed in with unconscious and emotion-laden desire, as well as gendered fantasies of domesticity, stirs up the batter to produce very Unheimlich results.

These issues do appear in other advertisements as well. I’ll conclude by simply sharing the Progressive “Hand Puppet” commercial, in which a woman schizophrenically splits into housewife and Flo puppet, which I think speaks for itself:

If you watch commercial television, you may have been surprised to see this year that the Maytag Man has gotten an extreme makeover.

Maytag Mag: Generation Five

The Maytag Man — aka “Ol’ Lonely” – is one of those classic icons of advertising — as commonly known as Ronald McDonald, the Michelin Man and the Energizer Bunny — due to its recurring appearance across decades of commercials broadcast on American TV. The Maytag Man has existed for almost half-a-century, since 1967, and while he’s been played by four different actors (my favorite being WKRP‘s Gordon Jump), his trademarked blue uniform, omnipresent cap and haggard appearance is unmistakable. You might not have seen him for awhile, but you probably remember him: the blue uniformed repair man, frumpy, bored, sleeping on his arm when he’s not otherwise mildly perturbed because he never gets called in for repairs.

It has been a cute, occasionally touching, but more often hilarious ad series. And the ads worked well on audiences because they made us feel sorry for him (the very first ad in ’67 called him “the loneliest man in town” and he’s acted that way ever since). The advertisements effectively sent the message: Maytag appliances are built so well they won’t ever need servicing by a repairman. They are infallibly reliable.

Or has the ad campaign been suggesting, consciously or not, that machines are more reliable than humans altogether? In the case of Ol’ Lonely, we never see him perform his actual job: repairing household appliances. Instead, his work is sitting around all day, waiting for use, moping about being discarded like a sad old tool in the toolchest. Great for Maytag, but bad news for humanity: you have been replaced by a washer-dryer. The Maytag Man was, in other words, a generalized symbol of the 20th century worker, embodying a subtle fear that we might be rendered useless, replaced by machines. It taps into the same alienating anxiety workers have when they see their jobs replaced by robots, but it’s smoothed over by humor and a celebration of the efficiency of the American production line.

Of course, we probably didn’t consciously think of the Maytag Man that way, mostly because we just want domestic machines like washers and dryers that work and don’t want to have to pay high repair bills for high-end appliances. But as a representative of mechanical perfection, by virtue of human obsolescence, he also got kind of old and outdated as we moved into the 21st century, and this January he was officially retired and replaced by a new, younger, more muscular man (played by Colin Ferguson)…who now quite literally IS the machine itself. (“He’s as tough and dependable as a Maytag appliance…Because he IS a Maytag Appliance,” their advertising proudly announces).

In the new series of advertisements, the Maytag Man speaks directly to the camera, as if the product were its own announcer, proudly boasting of his many qualities while mimicking the actions of the variety of appliances that the company has to offer. It’s a funny, effective pantomime. His body delivers the message of steady reliability and strength as much as his limbs perform mechanical behavior in a way that seems detached from his spokesman presence — for instance, when he plays the refrigerator, he runs in place while holding food products, speaking steadily and keeping his head fixed in place; or when he plays the dryer, he spins an impossible ball of clothing in front of him, constantly working while addressing the audience in a comically dramatic way.

The Maytag Man has evolved — now a 5th generation of the icon — but it would be oversimplifying things to accept the premise that he has just been “updated” as a commercial icon to keep up with the times, injected with a sense of knowing irony. It is true that he is more modern in the world of advertising, for he now has his own social media identity — with accounts on twitter and facebook that not only stream new ads (often timed with current events, like the “labor of love” meme above, posted around Labor Day), but also which sometimes respond back to followers and fans, soliciting interaction and viral sharing. He has his own web site. As a character, however, he has transformed from a character we can identify with into a literalized metaphor — and something of an uncanny Other who is both like us and nothing like us at all. The Maytag Man IS the machine, and in near every commercial that features him, there is a cheesy bell tone (“laundry done!”) and a cut which replaces his image with an image of the product itself.

This is in line with the Fantastic, identifiable whenever the figurative is made real. The ads perpetuate the fantasy that appliances are more reliable than humans not because they put men out of jobs, but because they are super-human. They are the achieved fantasy that mechanical men with militant efficiency and dedication to their jobs are the superior man. This is the exact opposite of the former Maytag Mag — his alter-ego and double. The service laborer has been replaced by the mechanical servant. Notice that there is never a direct interaction between them and the family members (mostly stereotypical housewives) doing their chores — we only see their backs as they rinse dishes in the sink and silently “hand” the dish to the Maytag Man, who begins to scrub it. There is a lack of communication, a lack of human interaction, which suggests that this is how work gets done: mechanically, without human involvement. Master to servant.

So if the ads and their fantasies are so fascistic and inhuman, why are they so appealing and funny? It’s not just that the delivery of the actor is so effective. It’s that the ads use a sort of “magic” that is laced with elements of the Freudian uncanny.

Take, for instance, this introductory spot ad, where the Maytag Man appears as BOTH washer and dryer, “fist-bumping” his doppleganger. If Maytag can make one man-who-is-machine, then they can mechanically reproduce them ad infinitum. Digital magic allows the actor to appear on screen with his double. The comedic “metal on metal” sound effect of their fist bump not only reinforces their role as “machines” but also betrays the unreality of the situation: the magic is all mechanical wizardry. That the woman who enters the room with a basket of laundry does not jump from the loud sound helps to construct the “other world” of these washers and dryers — a fantasy world, hidden in plain sight. When that secret world is erased by her entrance, the men are replaced with the appliances they were associated with in our imaginations, but at the same time we hear “birds chirping” in the ambient sound — semes of the “natural” world. The ad closes like an in-your-grille “Built Ford Tough” closer, with pressed aluminum taking over the screen to run the tagline, ‘What’s Inside Matters’ — but obviously this is a play on not merely our soiled personal objects, but organic authenticity, and the romantic expression that “it doesn’t matter what’s on the surface, it’s what is inside you that matters.” But the truth is that if people WERE appliances, we would not stuff our dirty clothes inside of them…unless, perhaps, they didn’t “matter” to us at all. So — this secret magical world, these fantasy machine-men — and what they represent to us psychologically — must also be erased.

The fantasy, of course, is that an inorganic object has a life all its own. Through advertising, these appliances are like a child’s wish for a teddy bear that can talk back, or a sect’s fantasy that a religious totem could possess the spirits of the dead. This is commodity fetishism, dramatized, uncanny, but also unsettled about the dead man they still are haunted by: the service worker of the past.

When I first saw this twisted comedic film, I laughed at its outrageousness. You might be horrified or you might guffaw. It speaks for itself in a mere five seconds. Here’s it is: 5SecondFilms’“Magic Show Volunteer” (2009):

After I recoiled from the unexpected in this “magic show,” I immediately wanted to share it with others. I had the “you’ve gotta see this” reaction that compels so many of us to share these sorts of things online in social media. I copied the link and was ready to press “send” on my twitter account. But then I realized something. It was a magic show skit. Hadn’t I seen something like this before?

And I had. Many of us have. These kinds of films, which are everywhere on the internet because so many people have access to the technology to make them now, are identical to the very first movies ever made. Here, for example, is a famous example from about 115 years ago, when the early “one reelers” were being exhibited to public amazement: George Melies’ “The Magician” (1898):

Just as early film makers were exploring the creative capacity of the medium, today millions are doing the same thing — with a range of success and failure — using the ubiquitous capacities of phone apps, tablets, webcams, camcorders and similar devices which can point, shoot, edit and share with an audience in a matter of minutes. I have one myself, and I’m playing around with it quite a bit, which is also leading me to start researching this stuff on youtube (subscribe to my channel) more and more. What I’m finding is that the most successful of them exploit editing and sound in order to trick the eye and confound expectations, which give them a foot in the cinema of the uncanny.

In writing about early cinema, film critic Tom Gunning termed this genre the “cinema of attractions” — film’s equivalent to the circus sideshow, where the spectacle is everything and the narrative is scant or completely unnecessary. Before roughly 1906, film had not yet converted over to the dominant narrative format that we know so well in most Hollywood films today, which continues to draw from 19th Century narrative structure. YouTube makes no such pretense (perhaps because when it got started, YouTube would limit postings to 5 minutes in length, which led to widespread sharing of quirky videos akin to America’s Funniest Home Videos — which, incidentally, just aired it’s 500th episode — more than anything else). The bulk of the experience of such shared videos cues its viewers in much the same way as the early cinema of attractions, especially in its reference to the “magic” of what we are shown.

In her essay, “You Tube: The New Cinema of Attractions,” critic Theresa Rizzo does a masterful job both situating such videos into the tradition of this genre, but also exploring what marks online video sharing as unique: “although YouTube clips arrest our attention and encourage us to gawk similarly through novelty and curiosity throughout the course of a day, they also invite us to respond and participate in a variety of ways.” Thus, instead of turning to your neighbor in the theater seats and saying “wow,” we can say “wow” (and much more) right back to the filmmakers in an online comment or foment our own viral marketing campaign through an international form of “word of mouth” advertising on facebook, twitter, and elsewhere. Such shared videos can also be remediated — transported into different media or even remixed. “The cinema of attractions is ultimately about acts of display, or exhibitionism rather than storytelling in a similar way remediation is all about showing off by being clever and creative. It is a self-conscious practice that points to the producer, itself and to the power of the medium.”

I am, of course, fascinated and enthralled by short cinema and all the online activity we see with such texts. I think there is a grand democratization of art happening right now, which is wonderful (despite my skepticism about much of it — see my essay “Mock Band: The Simulation of Artistic Processes” for more on that). But the main interest for me is the role of the uncanny in communicating “the power of the medium”…which often is figured as a technology with autonomous, supernatural agency. This power is interesting to read as a symptom of social or personal anxiety, and often deifies technology in ways intended to either disavow agency or sell products through commodity fetishism (e.g. consumer technology IS a commodity). Melies wasn’t selling anything but himself. His “camera” was a magic wand. Today, magic wands are camcorders in the hands of the masses, available to all — for a price — and if we want, we can “magically” edit our stories, our personal history, our record of events. This is a manifestation of the popular uncanny.

In the Five Second Film about “The Magic Show Volunteer” our spectacular laughter relies on the taboos that are encroached here, regarding violence against pregnant women. It is not so difficult to give a feminist critique to something so clearly gendered in its representation of power. The male magician, a staging of authority, literally appropriates the “uncanny” nature of organic childbirth (“popping” the belly in a horrific way (clearly a balloon is pricked) — almost as if the woman’s body was something artificial, like a doll — before ‘birthing’ the child from his mouth). This topsy-turvy figuration of “male birth” is a common trope in uncanny horror film (and reaches all the way back to Shelley’s Frankenstein). It is an aggressive fantasy that a Freudian might read as an Oedipal nightmare as much as a gross-out joke, with the “father figure” of the fanciful magician responsible for “disappearing” the child, swallowing it off screen and “magically” pulling the newborn from his throat on its umbilical tourniquet. All of this “magic” — the taboo male fantasy of the text — is performed by cinematic technology, and its placement in the cinema of attractions renders it safe, domestic…and perhaps far too easily reproduced and reinforced as a social message.

Or maybe it’s just funny, and we’re invited to laugh at the male fantasy it presents. Perhaps the gimmicky magic it offers up is mocked, and this is a parody of itself. I’m uncertain. That, too, is inherent to the uncanny.

On the Uncanny . . .

To some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psychoanalysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness — the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence.